Lead Forensics vs Hubspot vs Leadfeeder

28 September 2017 by
Otto Peura

An in-depth comparison of how Leadfeeder compares to two other platforms, Lead Forensics and Hubspot for tracking what companies are visiting your website.

We often get asked how Leadfeeder compares versus other platforms for identifying what companies are visiting your website. In particular, two competing platforms we discuss with customers often are Lead Forensics and Hubspot. All three platforms differ considerably, in what they are meant to do, where they are strong, where they are weak, how to try them out, cost, and features.

So to help answer your questions, in this comparison, we take an in-depth look at each platform to help you decide which one is best suited for your team’s specific sales needs based on pricing, available free trials, feature sets, tools, and more.

The chart below gives a quick comparison of Hubspot, Lead Forensics, and Leadfeeder. For a deeper look at the key differences between each platform, continue reading for our full comparison.

Leadfeeder

Lead Forensics

Hubspot Sales

Cost

Starts at $59/Month

Pricing is not listed an is generated on a per company basis. We have heard ranges from $99 to $2000 month.

Free & Paid plans at $50/month

Offer Free Trial?

14-day free trial

Must contact salesperson to demo the platform

Paid plan required for site visitor identification feature

Pricing Model

Month-to-Month. Unlimited users.

Charged Annually
(yearly contract)

Annual Contract encouraged. Month-to-Month available.

Setup Process

1-Click Google Analytics Integration

Must Install Script on Website

Must Install Script on Website

Backloading Past Data

Yes, 30 days standard, more on request.

No

No

Automatic Visitor Identification

Yes

Yes

Yes

Automatic Lead Scoring

Yes

Yes

No

Email Alerts

Yes

Yes

Yes

Page Tracking

Yes

Yes

Yes

Google Analytics Integration

Yes

No

No

CRM Integration

MailChimp
Salesforce
Pipedrive
Zoho
Web CRM
MS Dynamics

Salesforce
Zoho
Microsoft Dynamics

Zapier
Salesforce
Intergration to MailChimp & Zoho through 3rd party applications
Many others

Pricing

Both Hubspot and Leadfeeder are transparent with their pricing with both offering set monthly priced plans. However, Lead Forensics’ pricing is not publicly published and is generated on a per company basis. Here is detail on each.

Leadfeeder Pricing

Leadfeeder’spricing starts at $53/month and works its way up to $359/month with additional plans in between.

With annual billing the pricing starts at $59/month up to $399/month.

The first option will allow you to discover up to 100 companies that have visited your site, while the most expensive option gives you access to up to 3,000 companies (best suited for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic). Finally, for larger companies, there are enterprise plans that give you even more companies per month to find.

Lead Forensics Pricing

As we mentioned above, Lead Forensics does not use a set pricing model like most SaaS companies. Instead, they generate a price based on your company size, your specific needs, and more details they get during initial sales calls with you.

This process requires you to talk to a salesperson before you can commit to using Lead Forensics or even demoing their platform.

Although, we don’t have specific numbers for Lead Forensics’ pricing, customers who have switched from Lead Forensics have reported price ranges from $99 to $2000/month. Lastly, Lead Forensics charges annually versus month-to-month pricing.

Hubspot Pricing

Hubspot’s pricing model is much more complex since they offer multiple tools with different pricing. There is Hubspot CRM, Hubspot Sales, and Hubspot Marketing, which do way more than just track which visitors are on your website.

Thus, companies that purchase Hubspot generally do so for overall blog and email management, CRM management, and marketing automation. Tracking who visits your website is only one feature inside a much larger platform.

Depending on how your company handles all three operations, you can spend quite a bit of money with Hubspot.

In our experience, Leadfeeder customers who also use Hubspot typically spend $1500+ per month on Hubspot. The most common scenario we see with customers is that they use Leadfeeder with Hubspot, using the marketing and email automation of Hubspot combined with Leadfeeder for more exhaustive and accurate website visitor tracking.

Hubspot’s standalone sales application (which is most similar to Lead Forensics and Leadfeeder), has both free and paid options. The paid plan is $50/month peruser. The free and paid plans both have features for email alerts, email tracking, email templates, and so on.

The free plan limits feature usage while the paid plan gives you unlimited use of these features on a per user basis.

Both Hubspot and Leadfeeder bill month-to-month. So you can cancel anytime.

Free Trials and Setup Time

Leadfeeder and Hubspot both offer free options to demo their platform, which can be done by simply signing up for an account on their websites.

Leadfeeder Setup

Leadfeeder offers a 14-day, full-access free trial. Setup takes a few minutes to do via a one-click integration with your Google Analytics account.

First you sign up for an account, which is easiest to do by signing in with Google, because Leadfeeder works with Google Analytics, so it’ll make it easy to link your Google Analytics account in the next step:

Then you choose the Google Analytics account for which you want to track visitors:

Then you choose the GA view you want to use and enter company details:

There is no Javascript snippet you need to add to your website to see website tracking data and start using Leadfeeder – in other words, no developer is needed. Marketers, or anyone in the company with access to Google Analytics (GA) can set this up as long as they’ve been given access to the company’s GA account.

Leadfeeder is the only platform out of the 3 reviewed here that will backload past visitor tracking data once you sign up, so you can see how it works in a few minutes.

Finally, if you have questions, Leadfeeder does offer the option of scheduling a demo or just asking a question via Intercom live chat once you start the free trial.

Hubspot Setup

While not technically a “free trial”, Hubspot has a free plan for Hubspot Sales. However, the free version of Hubspot Sales does not include website visitor tracking and you must upgrade to paid to get that feature. From there, you can upgrade to the paid plan if needed.

To set up Hubspot’s prospecting feature to identify visitors on your site, you’d visit your Hubspot dashboard, head over to Prospects, and click “View tracking code” in the right-hand corner dropdown menu:

Then, you would paste the following code into the footer section of your website:

While adding this script isn’t necessarily difficult, it is an added step and something you may feel uncomfortable doing if you’ve never worked with code before.

Lead Forensics Setup

Unlike both Hubspot and Leadfeeder, where you can quickly create an account to demo the product yourself without the need to speak to a salesperson prior, with Lead Forensics, you must to talk to a salesperson and go through an onboarding process before you can demo their platform.

In order to test the product, you must fill out an opt-in form to get in touch with a salesperson via email or phone (this form asks for your number so they will likely call you).

You must have a brief conversation with the salesperson (~ 3 to 5 minutes) to ensure your business fits Lead Forensics’ model. From there, you’re passed on to a senior exec who will run through a short demo that will allow you to see the platform and available tools (using another client’s account or a test account).

At the last step of the demo, you are provided a code for your website to run Lead Forensics’ data capture tool. This allows Lead Forensics to show you data for your own site.

Lastly, after the demo period, your company will be given a quote, at which point you can decided whether or not you’d like to continue with Lead Forensics.

This has been one of the biggest frustrations we have heard from customers who chose Leadfeeder over Lead Forensics: With Leadfeeder, you can demo the platform right away and with Lead Forensics, you must go through the sales process first.

Tools & Features

If you need a complete suite of tools for CRM, marketing automation, email management, blog software and landing pages, then Hubspot is your best bet. They have separate platforms for each of these activities that all integrate with one another seamlessly. Leadfeeder and Lead Forensics, on the other hand, focus exclusively on tracking who visits your website.

However, when it comes to diving deeper into who your visitors are, what companies are visiting your site, etc, this is where Hubspot has its limitations.

Many customers at Leadfeeder use our platform in addition to using Hubspot because it gives their sales team deeper insights than Hubspot can give them. Lead Forensics is often used in the same manner.

For customers who don’t use Hubspot but do use Leadfeeder or Lead Forensics, they often use separate platforms for their marketing and CRM needs (i.e. MailChimp for email marketing, Zoho for CRM, etc).

One of the biggest advantages of using Leadfeeder or Lead Forensics versus Hubspot is the level of detail you can discover about your visitors. This includes what company they work for so you can follow up.

Accuracy

With Lead Forensics (and even Hubspot) you must first install a javascript code on your website to start tracking and identifying visitors.

Leadfeeder, however, integrates with Google Analytics and identifies visitors by pulling data from Google’s database of owned IP addresses, so you can get started without installing any code or needed developers

This is made possible thanks to Leadfeeder’s technology partnership with Google. It also means that Leadfeeder is able to show you visitors that were on your website before you signed up to Leadfeeder, whereas the other two tools collect data on visitors only after you’ve installed their scripts.

Leadfeeder backloads 30 days of historical data, but because it uses Google Analytics to collect data website visitors could be shown for as long as you’ve been using Google Analytics on your site.

The difference in the way each company collects its data will provide for varying results, but among the three platforms there does not seem to be one winner where accuracy is concerned.

It’s also important to note that there is not one way of tracking (Google Analytics versus installing new javascript code) that is intrinsically better for collecting data on website visitors. It comes down to choice and whether you want to see historical data. Some people prefer the peace of mind and ease of use that comes with plugging Leadfeeder into Google Analytics, whereas some are technical enough to know how to install some new website code and use Hubspot or Lead Forensics.

Data Management

Simply, Leadfeeder keeps a backlog of historical data of visitors to your site, what companies they’ve come from, and so on. Lead Forensics does not backlog data or allow you to view historical data.

Email Discovery

Both Leadfeeder and Lead Forensics have instant email detection for the leads they’ve identified on your website.

Lead Forensics will provide names, titles, and email addresses for contacts from the companies they’ve identified. This data is presented in a searchable list format.

Leadfeeder has a similar feature that will identify contact information but also find each contact’s social accounts like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (if available). Thus, allowing you to connect on those networks if appropriate.

Contact information can be found by clicking a company’s profile and scrolling down to find the available contacts:

Conclusion: Which Platform Should You Choose for Tracking Who Visits Your Website?

If your primary goal is to track who visits your website, Leadfeeder and Lead Forensics are your best bet because with Hubspot, website visitor tracking is only one feature in a much larger platform.

The choice between Leadfeeder and Lead Forensics, in the end, is up to you. Here at Leadfeeder, we’re obviously working hard to make Leadfeeder the best solution for website visitor tracking, so here is a final list of features we’re proud of that we think you’ll love about Leadfeeder:

You get a 14-day full featured free trial without talking to a sales team

You can use the tool without installing a script on your website

You can see a 30-day backlog of data

You can integrate with MailChimp to see not just who opens and interacts with your emails but also what pages they visit after they click through to your site

The data is fully synced with Google Analytics

We have very accessible pricing

Finally, if you want way more than website visitor tracking, including blog management, a CRM, marketing emails, landing page management, and full marketing automation, then Hubspot is the likely choice although, as we said above, many Hubspot customers who also use Leadfeeder have told us they enjoy using both tools since Leadfeeder offers more thorough and accurate website visitor tracking data.

Now that you're here

Leadfeeder is a Google Analytics tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too. Sign up requires a Google Analytics account and you can see results right after the sign up.